Learning the identity of an electronic system may be needed in order to troubleshoot, diagnose, and resolve system problems. The identity of an electronic system may depend on the perspective of the person inspecting the system and range from very general to very specific. For example, a system may be generally identified by a product name and more specifically identified by the release level of configuration data that may affect operation of the system.
Even for an experienced technician, the particular identity of an electronic system may not be apparent from visual inspection. Furthermore, visual inspection may be inconvenient because of product packaging, such as system cabinetry. It will be appreciated that an electronic system, as referenced herein, may be a single printed circuit board with one or more devices or multiple interconnected printed circuit boards each with one or more devices.
In systems made with programmable logic devices (PLDs), such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) or complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), the same physical hardware components may take on different personalities based on the configuration. Thus, one system may physically appear to be the same as another system, but the configuration of the systems may make them slightly or even very different from one another.
Unless an electronic system can be particularly identified, troubleshooting, diagnosing, and resolving system problems may be difficult. The present invention addresses one or more of the above issues.